Christine Tan

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Album Review: The xx—I See You

          Like sunlit clouds, the haunting nebulousness of echoey silence and skeletal textures that characterised The xx’s first two albums has been illuminated by the brassier tones, luxuriant production, and easy pop/dance clarity of I See You. There is still, even in the bright, ringing openness, a shimmering uncertainty and fragility; the band appears on the metallic mirror of the album cover, but their figures are distorted and blurry. Jamie xx furnishes the bulk of the soundscape on most songs, with his debut album In Colour’s lush, variegated electronic palette swathing what would be the black, empty space between voice and beat on Coexist. His strength really lies in textural and tonal variety, with an exquisite sense of balance. Lead single ‘On Hold’ is absolutely lovely; its various samples and melodies fade in and out, layering and building for calibrated punchiness and, in the distance, only within reach of conscious listening—gliding celestial tones streak like falling comets.

             Album-opener ‘Dangerous’ even more squarely grounds itself as a dance track, with Oliver’s dark, perpetual bass groove offset by brassy riffs. Good, but lyrically dull, and pans out perhaps a little too predictably. ‘Say Something Loving’ pales as the other single, and not even Oliver and Romy’s singing in unison can save the jarring awkwardness of its musical incoherence. Familiar breathiness and rawness are a welcome presence in the middle tracks, decorated with a whole host of startling instrumental effects. Oliver’s solo in the questioning, introspective ‘A Violent Noise’ reminds us of the band’s unique speech-like charm—carefully weighted delivery punctuated by silence or stillness—that makes their music so emotive in its simplicity. Romy’s ‘Performance’ is nuanced perfection, voice quivering close to the point of breaking, whisper-soft yet always clear. Violins and cellos similarly emote in accompaniment, half-soulful, half-tortured: get ready for goosebumps at their gigs. The experimental and emotional triumph of the album though, for me at least, is final track ‘Test Me.’ All sing but Romy is foregrounded: “Test me, see if I break/ Tell me this time you've changed/…Test me, see if I stay/ How could I walk the other way?” In the four years preceding I See You the band members led busy, separate lives, occupied with personal struggles and pursuits. This tender song is a testament to their relationship’s resilience; it could be Romy expressing her frustration with Oliver’s addictions, but that they all sing suggests a collective, harmonious acceptance, echoing the lucid honesty of the album title. Curiously enough, a soaring, whistle-like synth emerges above the choral sonorities, strikingly similar to the one in ‘Gosh’ (the first track of In Colour), as if some melodic spirit of Jamie. The great, sweeping waves of sound swell to collect a spattering of sonic flotsam—a tapping snare, a tinkering piano, glitching voice samples—all shuddering as if trying to recover from a good cry, before fading out.

             The success of I See You’s departure from minimalistic indie may be uneven, with disappointing clichés creeping into lyrics and beat regularity, and lacking the sheer genius and imaginative complexity of In Colour. But where they have reapplied the intelligence with which they manipulate sound in space, to place things where they matter, and now with much more sound, The xx has breathed new life into itself.

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Krakow Created with VSCO®

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Craigellachie, Aviemore Created with VSCO®

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Lost Endings

You cannot understand

how the night is a friend

how near-blackness

  is deeper

than longing –                  

 a line of road lamps stretched

into the distance.

  Shuttered shops slumber.

Below the forest of lights,

pale, muted fire

shivers on water.

  Roads become deserts:

the thrill of traversing

five lanes at once,

pausing at the third

to feel tiny.

  Stragglers still hungry, voices still bright.

Roaming to the edge of whispered stories,

they lapse into sleepy mumbling,

slumping on grass,

secrets spilling like drinks.

  You cannot understand.

You say you need to leave.

I say ok

  but every ok

folds depth away:

hasty photos meld

feathered night air

into the colour

  of our hair. Hours later,

your half-hearted hug still

clings, impossibly, like

cold, and my mind

  is at the traffic junction –

flurried afterimage of you

turning, running to

catch the last bus just in time.

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Absolute

Perhaps things seem to be in flux because we see in part,

too close up. From an airplane window, life is all pattern

and colour– radiating, meandering, blotched and blocked.

Higher up still time must only be a shimmering thread

trimming the single tapestry of all existence, a sight for gods.

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A Little Night Music

Each day a variation of the next

pivoted upon the refrain of thought

just before sleep. Monophonic prayer,

mind chants the same words, tries to

grasp the same motifs of murmuring

malaise. Oblique strips of light rise and

set from wall to wall

        to the grate and hum

                of a passing car, mezza voce

  now that the string of notes

has unravelled from the score

and swum away into

twisting rivers and

endless knots.

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Developing Images

Poetry is the frustrated quick-

sketch of fidgeting subject; the animal

sometimes too feral, sometimes too

shy. Graphite smudges paper

and hand. Light leaks, or a

ghost? Sounds align like letters on

ouija boards– before blur and

blank are filled with lies,

from the shadows: a cry.

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Dakota Crescent

I don't claim to have known you

for over twenty years, unlike your singing,

bird-keeping and sound-mimicking

residents. I don't claim to have known

the freedom of unlocked doors, or grown

up with your trees. I see an Old Dove,

an old lady hangs laundry to opera streaming

from lush corridor plants while young people

drink secondhand nostalgia. Can you love

a place you don't own?

I was hardly there when you were a short drive away.

Dakota, I'm so far away now and won't be

there to see you go,

not that a place can

say goodbye to you anyway,

but this knowledge still

stirs wistfulness-

so slight, so aching.

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National Day at Dakota Crescent

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Gig Review: Glass Animals, Manchester Academy 2 26/10/16

Gigs usually open with one of the band’s best or most recognisable tunes, but the peculiar Glass Animals, of course, chooses to make a entrance by blitzing through the 36-second spoken-word ‘Premade Sandwiches’. Before the crowd could recover from the delightful shock, we were swept up into the pounding folk drumbeat of ‘Life Itself’ and the tender but equally energetic ‘Youth’. The glistening sounds and fierce vibrance of How To Be A Human Being were perfectly complemented by the oozing sinuousness of earlier album Zaba, which had people shaking and snaking their bodies, with wrists twirling in their air to the smooth groove of ‘Hazey’ and ‘Black Mambo’. Onstage, frontman Dave Bayley danced most marvellously, hitting the beats with angular shapes and abandon.

(Photo by Jon Stone)

Musical interludes were fresh and varied, from sparse, ambient introductions for quieter numbers to rock guitar solos, showcasing their wide palette of sound colour. Despite their extensive sampling and electronic sounds, never once did they rely on a backing track. Everything was live and alive. Tentative synths eventually led to the opening lyrics of ‘Gooey’, and the collective thrill at its familiarity was palpable. This rendition was heavier and harder-edged than the single’s cooing roundedness on the album, which was not to my preference, but it demonstrated the band’s inventiveness and ability as live performers. Zaba’s lesser-known songs, though no less enjoyable, were perhaps harder to sing along and respond to, with the many of the lyrics being a tangle of nonsense poetry.

 I’d like to think that lyrics of How To Be A Human Being work differently, each song weaving a profound real-life narrative that, when chorused by the euphoric throng, evoked a wild pathos. Mostly centred around one character’s affection for another, the stories of the songs are complex and often fraught with distress and helplessness that belie their glitter. Perhaps this is difficult to grasp fully without reading the lyrics, and some of it is very deep and dark – “It hits my head and I feel numb/ My body's looking wrong” on ‘This Side of Paradise’ are the thoughts of a basketball superstar’s lover as she kills herself. It’s an idealistic thought but I do believe that the act of singing drew us closer to these other lives. Being a part of that collective emotional experience, one person in the multitude singing together, surging to the same beat – this alone felt like magic, a celebration of human connectedness and life itself.

  Glass Animals saved two of their most popular songs for last: ‘Season 2 Episode 3’ had everyone singing to its cute video-game hooks and nearly all its lines, especially relishing “My girl eats mayonnaise/ from a jar when she’s getting blazed.” There were calls for ‘Pork Soda’ right after, and what a stunning performance this one was. Beginning by whipping up a handclap rhythm in the audience (nicely corresponding to the setting of the song in city streets), Dave raised a pineapple (‼) above his head to the refrain “Pineapples are in my head/ Got nobody cause I’m brain dead”. An instrumental outro with a brilliant keyboard part repeatedly built up to several false climaxes, before giving the last real one everything. This artful, gloriously manic finish alone made their somewhat short set forgivable, and we left a little dizzy from it all.

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Album Review: Gameshow —Two Door Cinema Club

After four years of time apart that followed the cruel pressures of wild popularity and touring, Two Door Cinema Club have kept themselves alive and together. Sonically, the confident pop-gloss of Gameshow betrays none of the tension-and-illness-ridden hell they’ve gone through—their iconic guitar sparkle has morphed into synth shine, punk rhythms and knotty riffs have been smoothed to disco funk beats. The lyrics, however, point to intentional, darker messages of being consumed by consumerism, or disconnected in the Internet Age. Nothing terribly revelatory, and even with the backing children’s choir on lead single “Are We Ready? (Wreck)”, lines such as ‘There’s always something else/ Waiting on the shelf’, or the repeated ‘Generation information’ in “Bad Decisions” fall flat on the ear and mind.

  Alex Trimble’s vocals, warm and spirited on the first two albums, statically sit a few layers in the background. We start to miss his previous expressiveness, where the poetry of a single line (remember ‘She spoke words that would melt in your hands’?) captured the ear in a way repeating words cannot. There are definitely moments where their funk/80s/Prince-inspired dance party truly comes alive: the affected whoops and classic rockstar abandon of “Gameshow”, the bright falsetto and groovy bass of “Fever”, and “Je Viens De La”, which is a one massive whirling disco ball with Trimble blazing at cosmic pitches in the chorus. Some of it seems to be a tentative experiment in new sounds, such as the overt synths “Surgery”, and “Lavender”, which sounds vaguely like a retro video game. The lyrics are puzzling at times—what does ‘And if I sleep tonight/ The cosmic radiation/ I won't complain’ on “Lavender” even mean?—and dully lovelorn at others. It’s all not enough to lift itself out of the slush of crooning guitars, tinkly effects and regular beats, and the incoherence of lyrics leaves us with nothing to grasp at when the hour has passed and the album fades away forgettably like music you heard while shopping for groceries.

  At the heart of the album lies an anxiety about what is “safe”, and what is “interesting”. For the band, safety is Beacon overturning Tricky Second Album Apprehensions with its roaring success but similar sound. In consciously creating in the vein of pop music from decades past, the new Two Door Cinema Club positions themselves at a tangent to what they were, while trying to repudiate certain aspects of contemporary culture and expectations of themselves as the typical indie rock band. What is new to them may not be to us, sadly, and Gameshow, for all its groove and verve, fails to captivate because we’ve heard a lot of it before. It lacks the surprise and imagination of a truly glorious retro-inspired creation such as say, Random Access Memories, and while the songs are longer, choruses and bridges pan out predictably and the heavy-handed production leaves us cold. Its moments of brilliant melodic writing are in riffs and solos here and there, but they do not shine like the intelligent, maddeningly catchy hooks and intertwining lines of Tourist History and Beacon. All this said, we should be very glad that they’re back, and there is more than enough in the new album to party to, which I’m sure plenty will in their upcoming sold-out tour.

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crux

the x marks the end

symbol of itself, encoded

release of breath with the meeting of teeth

like sword blades, or wooden beams fitted

for a king's death. Ankh, carved and worn,

grasped like a key, what cannot be known

but surer than knowing: needing,

sprung from the void: a beginning.